Dear visitors and members, with the staff having moved on to other life interests and as a result of changes in people's internet usage habits, the CodeWalrus community have migrated almost entirely to Discord, IRC and WalrusIRC and is now essentially a place where to hang out, chat about gaming, programming, music, anime, and chill. As a result, even though the CW forums will remain open for posting, for faster TI, Casio or HP calculator help and news we recommend using the bilingual TI-Planet forums instead.

During the next few months, we will be working on updating parts of our website.

At first, most of the changes will be invisible, internal changes. When all the internal parts are ready, then we will start adding new features based on them.

Since most of the new features are still in a planning phase, we prefer to keep the details secret for now. If everything goes as planned, then this should make our site into a more unique experience that can be used for more than just a platform on which we share the games we make.

Unfortunately, working on the website can cause it to be less stable. We'll still try our best to keep downtimes at a minimum, but if something does get messed up, then at least you know what caused it.

Will there be changes to the SMF install? I am curious about what will be the changes. Just make sure to not push alpha or even pre-alpha versions of your site to the public as replacement to fully-working builds, though. That can be annoying for users >.< (it's usually better to allow users to opt out or only offer the new site as test)

Once we're done with these updates, SMF will probably be removed completely (though we might keep a read-only version of the old forum online).

The updates will largely fall into 3 categories:The first cathegory is the forum. The forum will be replaced by a system that functions more like a blog. It is intended to be an easy to use and better platform to post about projects (with features such as the ability to post as a group, and each member of the group can post in the blog and edit posts there). A forum-like system will probably also still be present, but probably based more on tags than on full boards, so that it is easier to order topics based on personal preference.The 2nd category is a social aspect. Instead of just using our website as a platform to release our games, we'll try to turn it into a place where gamers can meet eachother. There will be stuff like a system to find friends for co-op games. The system will be focussed on meeting strangers (but not random like Omegle). We have some cool ideas for this system, but since almost all of it is still in planning stage, we prefer to keep the details to ourselves for now.The final category is internal stuff to make those systems possible.

@Jokeriske already programmed the new account system and a part of the blog/forum system. I'm still in Thailand for 2 weeks, but after that I should have time to work on the website too. For now, those systems are in a hidden folder on our website, and they will remain hidden untill they're either ready or untill we do a beta test. After that, the main problem would be getting enough people to join to make the social parts work.

I hope you keep the old posts or convert them to blog topics with comments. I think it might be a good move to move away from forums, though. I might be biased since I run a forum but a lot of smaller sites that starts side by side with larger ones tend to not have an high level of activity, so the move to a blog to showcase people projects and such things might help making it stand out. The tag thing is something I wanted to implement on CW but we would still keep the forum system (just that it would work closer to PICO-8 forums rather than a traditional bulletin board, and we would keep the bulletin board system in place as an option for people who don't like the new system).

As for the random stranger thing, yeah it's a good move to not go full Omegle, else get ready for massive troll influxes. >.<

I hope you keep the old posts or convert them to blog topics with comments. I think it might be a good move to move away from forums, though. I might be biased since I run a forum but a lot of smaller sites that starts side by side with larger ones tend to not have an high level of activity, so the move to a blog to showcase people projects and such things might help making it stand out. The tag thing is something I wanted to implement on CW but we would still keep the forum system (just that it would work closer to PICO-8 forums rather than a traditional bulletin board, and we would keep the bulletin board system in place as an option for people who don't like the new system).

As for the random stranger thing, yeah it's a good move to not go full Omegle, else get ready for massive troll influxes. >.<

Yeah there are going to be alot of trollers out there, i think we are going to keep the forums up as a read only mode.

SOmething to keep in mind though is that if your blog suddenly becomes very popular due to certain type of video games, then that alone can bring in trolls, so it's up to you to decide how to enforce rules. On Omnimaga when nDoom got featured it brought in a massive influx of spammy or troublesome users from hardcore gaming news sites and eventually we had to instate temporary modified rule enforcement to fend them off (although we would probably not have gotten to do it if certain people who were not involved in the first place got involved and constantly tried to force us to run our site the way they run theirs. The latter was like if they tried using oil to extinguish the fire or to keep it alive while we tried extinguish it.

But at first you are probably not gonna get comments much, so it's best to focus on content and showcasing your content elsewhere (like here) to increase traffic.

SOmething to keep in mind though is that if your blog suddenly becomes very popular due to certain type of video games, then that alone can bring in trolls, so it's up to you to decide how to enforce rules. On Omnimaga when nDoom got featured it brought in a massive influx of spammy or troublesome users from hardcore gaming news sites and eventually we had to instate temporary modified rule enforcement to fend them off (although we would probably not have gotten to do it if certain people who were not involved in the first place got involved and constantly tried to force us to run our site the way they run theirs. The latter was like if they tried using oil to extinguish the fire or to keep it alive while we tried extinguish it.

But at first you are probably not gonna get comments much, so it's best to focus on content and showcasing your content elsewhere (like here) to increase traffic.

yeah i know, we actually have some plans for that, but first we are going to focus on development, then we are going to focus on how we are going to run things, but i can't tell much now, but i can tell you that we are making good progress, i'm so excited about this project

You could upload them at img.omnimaga.org unless the new site will take months to be public, in which case it's up to you if you want to create hype too early or not. We can give suggestions on design/layout, though.

You could upload them at img.omnimaga.org unless the new site will take months to be public, in which case it's up to you if you want to create hype too early or not. We can give suggestions on design/layout, though.

yeah, currently i'm the only one developing the system because Ben is in thailand, this is going to take some months for sure, but it really depends how advanced we are going to make it. I will screenshot if i have something more to show then just the layout